Broken Love Machine, Or How to Live a Great Love Woman’S Torso
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Broken love machine, or how to live a great love Woman’s Torso We pressed our hands against the stone and, of the sculptures, continuing what had been interrupted as in a single move, we jumped over the wall. Without or petrified. Like the white of architecture, the white believing that I was already on the other side, I lowered of our garments was gradually soiled with mosses myself subtly to notice some difference between the and lichens. Dancing with the statues was liberating; worlds. When fear reaches the limit, it becomes a beast. it seemed that it gave life to those forcibly inanimate The feeling of death that fear causes petrifies the bodies, beings, evoking another body presence. mutes the subjects, turns them into objects, into statues, but in fear there is also a breath. It seems that the skin The patriarchal house Marcel Gautherot. Alfredo Ceschiatti, 1956. IMS Collection becomes thinner, the internal organs wake up and the body is more sensitive to adrenaline. On the other side Designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer in the 1950s of the wall, the house produced a curious fascination. and built between 1951-1953 in Rio de Janeiro when the Around and even inside it, a series of female granite city was still the capital of Brazil [between 1763-1960], and bronze sculptures were present. The figurative Canoas House was the architect's residence for six years sculptures, combined with the house's abstraction, with his daughter Ana Maria and his wife Anita, before seemed to inhabit in silence. One could say that it going to Brasília to accompany the construction of was Perseus' own curse against Medusa, but perhaps the country's new capital. A preliminary survey of the it was something else entirely. Next to the rock that house is manifested by a series of characteristics that merged architecture and local geology together laid two gave the author a name of national and international brooms and a barrel of garbage, a woman's torso and a recognition: sensuality and eroticism materialized reclining woman, leaning against a light veil carved in by the relationship with the beauty of the curved and the nakedness of its body. As we moved, other women organic forms of women, as well as the natural landscape emerged. We danced around these split-body objects, of Rio de Janeiro. relating to each missing curve while I filmed in motion. Being there brought a sense of desecration of something, The relationship between loving muses and nature Marcel Gautherot, Alfredo Ceschiatti’s Sculptures, 1956. IMS Collection even if quietly, even if out of sight. Nina moved subtly, is not fortuitous. Nature has, for centuries, been CARTHA II 2020 / 14 slowly and in silence, mirroring her movements to those continuously associated with the virginal love-giving 1 1 “Não é o ângulo reto que female body. The representation of women, for example, division into binarism even when gender and sexuality me atrai, in 19th century landscape painting brought together are made invisible functions within the constructive Nem a linha reta, dura, the concepts of nature, women, motherhood and the mechanism of modern architecture. inflexível criada pelo o homem. “natural” feminine. In the Brazilian romanticism of O que me atrai é a curva European influence, the painting “A Carioca” (1882) by Within architectural modernity, in 1917, Le Corbusier livre e sensual. the artist Pedro Américo (born in Paraíba, 1843-1905), had published Towards an architecture, where he A curva que encontro no curso sinuoso dos nossos can be an example, as so many others. The relationship exposed the idea of a house as a Machine for Living 1950 Oscar Niemeyer's sketch of Casa das rios, between the pure woman, with white and glossy skin, in, which had an enormous influence in Brazilian Canoas nas nuvens do céu, the bowl dripping with water, sensuality and even modernism. However, outside the domain of reason, no corpo da mulher preferida. masked sexuality, evoke the construction of a moral Niemeyer's alleged modern sensual tropicalism, which De curvas é feito todo o femininity associated with an equally pure and fertile enchanted many modernists, evidently arises from universo, nature. Coming from a fundamentally masculinist an epistemological ethos that embraces modernity O universo curvo de Ein - stein.” – (poem by O. Nie - gaze, the representation through the horizontality of within a fundamentally masculine system, masked as meyer) the bodies of both architecture, nature and women in universal. When coining the title of a national hero Niemeyer’s sketches reinforce this paradigm. But if the of architecture, through a self-centered masculinity, a sensuality of Niemeyer's curves showed the woman as characteristic that accentuates the value of the demiurge landscape by associating body and nature, on the other architect, one can feel doubts about his sensualization hand, it perpetuated oppression against women’s bodies of modernism, arising fundamentally via a white, confining them to their sex and reproductive means. masculine, patriarchal European matrix. In this sense, love is materialized by a compulsory heterosexuality, as in its most known poems: “It’s not Patriarchy, as Gerda Lerner recalls, is a historical the right angle that attracts me,/ Nor the straight, hard, creation formed by men and women in a process that Marcel Gautherot, Alfredo Ceschiatti’s Sculp- tures, "Bather", 1956. IMS Collection unyielding line created by man./ What attracts me is took about 2500 years, based on the commercialization the free and sensual curve./ The curve that I find in the of female sexuality, and on the transformation of winding course of our rivers,/ in the clouds of heaven, women into a resource enchanted by class differences, on the body of the favorite woman./ The whole universe which according to her, is expressed in terms of gender. is made of curves,/ Einstein's curved universe.”1 Women themselves became a resource, acquired by men. The architecture could not be indifferent to the However, the enunciation of love as a cultural deed current sexual system, to the extent that one could call dates back from antiquity. Eros, the god of Love in it the modern patriarchal house. Greek culture, was paid a compliment by Plato’s “The Symposium” in 380 BCE. Love was built through The role of this tropical modernism didn’t look upon the different narratives and discussed by men, among men patriarchal eroticism pointed by the objectification of since women were excluded from collective debates. the women's bodies, that became hegemonic in a place Plato’s readings of Eros can deepen the understanding of of construction of a national identity. The discursive, how Niemeyer’s modernity perpetuated and translated imagetic and ideological construction of it can be seen in its affections. Eros, when incarnated by his modernity, the encounter of media from the Exhibition of Alfredo assumes universalizing and masculinist garments, Ceschiatti, in 1956 at Niemeyer’s House. playing a fundamental role in perpetuating a sexual CARTHA II 2020 / 14 2 The exhibition view under a platonic sense of femininity and love. Different from the usual sites of art exhibitions, the one Not only does the architecture have a role of seduction made by Alfredo Ceschiatti, an artist known for the through an imported myth of femininity, so do the sculptures to be settled in Niemeyer’s buildings, was sculptures. In this magazine edition, were seven displayed in the Canoas House's interiors and gardens. highlighted sculptures: Acrobats, Liliane, Bather, The exhibition was published in the fifth edition of Rooster, Fish, The Three Graces, and Woman’s Torso. Modulo (The Magazine of Architecture and Visual Arts Contemporary Brazilian critics might have pointed out of Brazil), of which Niemeyer was editor-in-chief, in the importance of the feminine nudes, its “voluptuous order to celebrate its fifth anniversary, and the displayed and sexualized” bodies, its adornment function, the photographs in the Magazine were taken by Marcel woman and its single function of pleasing the men’s Gautherot, a French photographer based in Brazil, universes or even the friendship pact between men that who played a fundamental role in documenting the had women sculptures as a trademark. In this sense, images of a national modernity. Beginning to circulate the culture of fetish offers a parallel with the culture 5th Edition of Modulo Magazine, 1956 – Anniversary of Modulo, Ceschiat - in the year of the inauguration of President Juscelino of the commodity present between the 19th and 20th ti’s Exhibition (pages 8 and 9). National Library Collection Kubitschek (January 31, 1956), the exhibition and the centuries. Rethinking the use and fetishistic cult of the publication are important archives in considering female body as a formal operation in architecture, it is the construction of a modern and public body which imperative to rethink the cultural parameters between contradicts the notion of the house as a private domain. the feminine as a natural body and merchandise, especially since architecture in a capitalist context makes The house was divided into levels that separate it the hallmark of a culture, an advertising body. This is dialectically what is shown and what is secret. While especially important when Niemeyer tells in his memoirs the compartmentalized spaces of intimacy are hidden books he was invited by Juscelino to build Brasilia in by the new topography of the house, the free design the after-party of Ceschiatti’s Exhibition. Within that, of the ground floor, held by the spaces of sociability, one could argue that in an important political context, become stage for this great constructed scenario. This that would lead to the building of the new Capital space becomes a voyeuristic exhibition device, both of a Brasilia, the house functioned as a seductive device.